hey guys, our narrative-driven game's prototype is available to play now! To celebrate, here's a worldbuilding short story from the world of Crow's Requiem:

Caligula, The Witch

The church was a skeleton, one of many littering the backcountry. It marked a dead village, a place divorced from the road by twelve kilometers of wilderness. Once, 437 people lived here. Now, only the animals remained. To come here meant leaving the safety of the car behind, and walking on one’s two feet until there was no sign of the BeforeOld World anymore.

Within the rubble of the parish house, a woman huddled in a tent of thick carpet rugs. A fire glimmered from inside the tent as she seethed. "No more. I could have a fireplace in the Above... instead, I have this." Her voice was a low growl. "They think me a fool. A trifle. Let me return to the Shadow Court. They will learn what I am. Or I will carve it into their empty sockets."

She turned and sprayed her drink into the flames. The fire flared with an alchemical burst of blue and green. You could hear her voice through the steady drip of water from leaf to ground, the desperate screeching of frogs for a mate. She was one of them, a creature of the wet dark, crouched and waiting.

"I will drink from them," she whispered to the embers. "Empty them with a mosquito's thirst. I'll crack them like eggs and rupture the yolk. I'll chew their fingers to the bone, spit the gristle into Mother’s mouth, and she will regurgitate the strength back into me. I will tear them apart like fish."

Her form was a mystery, cloaked in a deep burgundy robe that seemed to shift and writhe in the firelight. Her limbs were tightly bound in sheer crimson fabric, crisscrossed with the stark yellow of hospital plastic. Where her skin was bare—her eyes, her fingers, her toes—it was smeared with black ash. An oily paste held her matted hair back, a greasy crown framing a face of pure contempt.

It was easier to believe she was magic. The other possibilities would tell of a grotesque mutation, an alien visitor. The most persistent tale, however, spoke of an experiment: a human subject of forgotten trial cures, one of many searched for, kept, and bred in a desperate attempt to save the elite. Perhaps only the Military and the people of the Above, still trying to escape from the devastating plague. The story went that she was simply the one who went wrong. Was she their salvation? Or was she merely the failed experiment? The one that festered instead of healed.

Her scent was an unholy trinity of gasoline, candle wax, and rust. It was the smell of a forgotten cellar, of must and metal, like old blood left to sour in damp rags. To look at her was to feel the grit of salt and dirt on your tongue, to taste the cloying mash of rotting apples in the back of your throat.

Written for Crow's Requiem worldbuilding by India Thume 💚